Salted!

My new favorite Boston word reveals a lot about who we are.

People from Boston like to reinforce the fact that they're right. Ron Damata is telling me this over a plate of soggy orange french fries in the Boston Latin School cafeteria on a Tuesday in November. And they do this, he says, by making you feel bad about being wrong. This is why the next big Boston word has quickly become an epidemic among kids his age.

"And how old are you?" I asked Damata.

With the diamond stud in his left ear and a blond Caesar cut, Damata, who is from Roslindale, gives off the Eminem aura of the veteran bad boy. But something about my simple question made him look vulnerable, like he'd been set up.

"I'm 19," he said as he lowered his head for protection.

The six other guys at his table, all of whom had made it to senior year without being kept back, pounced on the opportunity.

"Salted!" they yelled.

The first time I got "salted" was about a year and a half ago. My wife came home from teaching in Somerville, waited for an opportunity to insult me -- I had, once again, failed to do the dishes -- and as I stood at a loss for a snappy comeback, hit me over the head with it: "Salted."

As far as usage goes, this was an irregular salting. Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight -- person one insults person two, and person three informs person two that he or she has just been salted. It's an exclamation point on someone else's insult. My wife had heard the term in a seventh-grade class (the classroom environment is, unfortunately for teachers, the perfect place for a salting to occur) and made it an immediate part of her lexicon simply because she thought it was funny. For me, it was more than a bit of slang comedy. It was, in ways that my Virginia wife could not understand, a microcosm of what it means to be from Boston.

Salted, in this usage, appears to be exclusive to the region, and its demographic reaches from late grammar school into high school. The etymology of salted, however, is the subject of much debate. One camp says it's an abbreviation of insulted, and the word is actually "sulted." Others say it's short for assaulted. The third school, and the one that is most convinced that it's right, says it simply comes from the idea of throwing salt into a wound. But when it is used, and how, is not up for debate; and in this case, the particular word may be new but the role it plays is not. Depending on where you grew up and when, you may have heard other terms perform similar duty: "Burned." "Busted." "Faced." "Dissed." "Sauced." It's like the way "the Eskimos have all those words for snow," one Boston Latin student said when I asked why we have so many terms for the same thing.

But salted is better because it's more cruel in that direct, remorseless way that children have. It is not, like its ancestors, meant to be antagonistic. It is final. There is no comeback. You've been salted. It stings.

Bostonians love the game of insulting one another. The Wicked Good Guide to Boston English, a website that has become the recognized caretaker of our peculiar language, says we even have our own two unique terms to describe this event -- "cracking" and "zoo on" -- which join the more widely used "ranking" and "capping." "Salted," and its forerunners, are simply punctuation points in this game.

I first started to think deeply about salted one day last year when I made my first trip to Boston Latin. I was there to survey the students about the classic Boston words to see which ones were still surviving. I polled nearly 200 students and was shocked to see that the icons were fading. Only 61 percent knew that chocolate ice cream sprinkles were called "jimmies;" a mere 11 percent still said "tonic;" and just over half knew the term that linguists identify as the most Boston of the Bostonisms: "frappe." Before my trip, I'd spoken to a couple linguists about how local vernaculars work, and they had all told me that if the kids weren't saying them, they weren't going to survive. What would? The linguists told me to ask the kids what they were saying. Their answer, over and over, was "salted."

E.B. White once said that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies because of it. But to explain my fascination with salted -- and why I think it's the next big Boston word, destined to make its way onto T-shirts at Fenway Park -- we must dissect this city, its people, and our wicked sense of humor.

In the neighborhoods of Boston, its blue-collar suburbs, and all down the South Shore, you get a group of young people together and the rules are simple: You're either making fun of someone else or you're being made fun of. And since the former is more pleasurable than the latter, we become incredibly adept at insults. In Southie, where I grew up, you had to be able to bring it to survive life on the street corner. As a result, "we lead the nation in insult comics who don't actually think they're comedians," says Nick Stevens, a comedian who was raised in Braintree.

I called Stevens because he has used the cruel wit he honed growing up -- "I was a fat kid with a hairdo they called 'dead-cat head,' so I had to develop my skills" -- to create a character who has become an Internet sensation. Paul "Fitzy" Fitzgerald is, in Stevens's creation, a "typical Masshole." He drinks too much, worships the Red Sox and Patriots, and hates everyone else. When Stevens is in character, often in the parking lots at sporting events where he films his segments for townienews.com, his job is to insult everyone. The character is both a parody of and an homage to a certain type of Bostonian, but in Fitzy and in our city's culture, Stevens sees a deeper role for the insult.

"We've got these wicked senses of humor to protect and police our own," he says. "We don't let anyone get too big. Boston's nasty sense of humor is our ultimate interpersonal checks and balances system. I live in New York now, and when I go home and see my friends, they're like 'I saw you on that TV show. You're doing great.' Then two beers in, they'll remind me of what a fat loser I was in middle school. If you go to another city, people have this positive sense of humor where they find new, clever ways to create an original laugh. In Boston, we take the easy shot. 'You're fat. I'm going to ride you.' Boston is a cruel, cruel place, and I think it comes from a combination of rebelling against our Puritanical roots, repressed Irish Catholic upbringings, and the miserable cold winter. So we drink and make fun of each other. Look at how many amazing comedians have come out of Boston, and the one trait they all share is that they're great at ripping on people."

Insults, of course, are not exclusive to Boston. Jewish comedians all over the country have been doing it for many decades. And the insult exclamation point, such as salted, has a close cousin in the "Oh, snap" of black culture. But M.J. Connolly, a linguistics professor at Boston College who has studied Boston language, thinks that our particularly heavy reliance on insults can be traced, sociologically, back to the British and the Irish who helped shape the region and its English usage. "British humor is very strongly ironic, full of snide remarks, and I wonder if that isn't where the sociolinguistic attitude comes from for Boston and New England," Connolly says. "And cutting people down to size is very much an Irish social behavior -- whether out of jealousy or fear of success. Viciousness is part of the linguistic [character] of those languages, and that's in many ways what salted is doing here."

Language is fickle. It's generational and regional and even sub-regional. And with slang, the kids are in control; fads can come and go before adults even catch on. But that didn't stop my wife and me from trying to make salted happen with adults. She had lukewarm success in her office, mostly because she works with a lot of recent college grads; I failed miserably dropping it into seemingly appropriate adult insult scenarios or yelling it at the television when we had friends over to watch the presidential debates. Slang is a kids' game, and schoolyard humor rings hollow when you try to bring it into your 30s. And with salted, we may have been too late. Once something becomes so ubiquitous that the grown-ups have caught on, it's over (see "word," "foshizzle," and the dustbin of Saturday Night Live catch phrases).

One Sunday morning while I was on my salted quest, I stopped into Joseph's Bakery in Southie and two young boys sitting on top of the slush cooler tried to sell me the Sunday Globe (God bless them). I recognized one of the kids, 10-year-old Joey Starck, because his father, Richie, was the closest thing I ever had to a cruel older brother (I like Richie Starck, but the facts are the facts). Based on his genetics, I figured Joey could bring it, but when I pulled out my notebook and asked him about salted, he opted for the "code of silence" defense. "I don't say salted," he said as he looked at me with his best choirboy face on. His sales partner, Matt O'Brien, a 12-year-old in a Red Sox hat and a Celtics world championship T-shirt, both of which were at least two sizes too big, chimed in and said they don't say it anymore. "We grew out of it," said O'Brien, who claimed he left salted behind when he moved on to middle school. "A lot of people say things and don't know the meaning, but when I found out what it means, I stopped."

As O'Brien continued laying his shockingly articulate snow job on me -- "It makes other people feel bad," he said, "and it makes the person who said it feel good" -- Starck, both impressed and surprised by what his buddy was feeding me, finally broke character.

"He's only saying that because you're here," Starck said as he looked at me, as if to let me in on the fact that I was being salted and didn't even know it. I did know it, but as I stood there listening to a pint-size linguist 20 years my junior work me over, I knew I was out of my league. I asked a lot of kids to give me an example of how salted was used, and they almost always did so by first insulting me.

I walked out to my car, feeling kind of old, and then I remembered I wanted to go back and write down a description of what they were wearing. When I glanced down at their feet, I had my comeback.

"Do you know what bobos are?" I asked them, busting out a bit of old-school Boston slang for a pair of cheap knockoff sneakers (which one of them was wearing). O'Brien said no. Starck just raised his eyebrows suspiciously.

I didn't have to say anything more; when I was growing up, if you didn't know what bobos were, then you were wearing them.

Salted.

SIDEBAR

Interpreter, anyone?

Try translating

this sentence:

"Sully blasted me with an elastic while I was at the bubbler seeing if I couldn't get the American chop suey off my Compliments. Now I gutta take 'em to the cleansas."

Note: "Couldn't get" is a Boston negative positive; Girbaud jeans were a staple of Boston fashion in the '80s (worn with the cuffs tapered narrowly).

-- B.B.